SolidOS
Folder pane needs nice way to delete items from the folder.
Currently, there is no way to delete files ot folders in the folder list, unless you are Developer and have access to the Internals pane.
Possibilities are many
- adding red buttons on each item, or
- checkboxes on each item and a general delete button
- '...' more stuff icon on each thing, submenu allowing not only delete but other things like copy link, like, etc.
- trashcan which things can be dragged onto.
Check other systems and pod browsers for their UI languages.
We may want to consider incorporating Solid-File-Client that @bourgeoa and I and a team of others have developed over the past three years. It has extensive tests and works in or out of a browser to provide the following operations on container trees : recursive delete, move, copy, zip. We'd have to invent a UI, but the guts of all the major operations are there.
I'd see it working like this :
- user clicks an "edit folder" button
- checkboxes appear next to all contained resources
- a selectbox of actions (delete, move, zip, etc.) appears
- when user selections an action, checks some boxes, and clicks do it
- we ask for confirmation
Valid destination for move, copy, zip could be in same pod or a different pod or local file system, solid-file-client handles all the same including transferring .acl and .meta to local when needed.
Some additional ideas from chats:
- if one deletes a folder one gets a message that warns the user that the action will delete also its content. And in addition, if I think about an OS, I could imagine also having a trash can where I can drag and drop a folder into. Prompting the same message.
- Or right click on the folder and delete.
- When you are helping someone decide whether they really want to delete something, then things like “A total of 1452 files in 132 folders - around 12.4GB” which is probably the best we can do for now, and is what a laptop OS would give you.
- But a user would be better served by “Your medical data between 2004-01 and 2008-09” or “Thirteen albums, 1340 photos, 789 tracks and 18 playlists”
- Note a big link between the function which lets them see what they are throwing away and the one which shows them what they have given people access to, or [potentially] consent to. It is the same function. So if we do it well we get a lot of value.
Apple has a guiding principle of minimizing the chance of data loss. This leads to confirmations of trashing large folders, among other things. It's sort of like rm -rf vs rm -r vs rm. Theoretically, people would only use the -r after being warned that the targeted filepath is a non-empty directory. Equally theoretically, people would only use the -f after being told that something within that filepath is protected against deletion. In practice, people tend to go straight to rm -rf because they would never accidentally try to delete a directory holding vital information ... until they do.
